'Srebrenica'
Code Word to Silence Critics of US Policy in the Balkansby Stella
L. Jatras
Special to Antiwar.com
7/31/00

The
Bosnian Serb military stands accused of committing some of the worst
human rights crimes since World War II during and following the battle
for Srebrenica in 1995. HOLOCAUST! GENOCIDE! ETHNIC CLEANSING! Claims
of 7,000 (or 8,000, or 10,000, or whatever figure is needed to elicit
the desired response) Muslim men and boys slaughtered and Dutch
troops accused of failing to stop the slaughter! Five years later
the allegations not only persist, but are accepted as fact by a compliant
and unquestioning media. Yet in five years fewer than 2000 bodies have
been discovered in an area where war raged for four years and even those
bodies have not been identified as Muslim or Serb, and it has not been
determined how they died.

The
Code word is "Srebrenica." Srebrenica equates to holocaust.
Srebrenica equates to genocide. Srebrenica equates to ethnic cleansing.
And because claims of mass graves and genocide in Kosovo are being discredited,
what better way to continue to demonize the Serbs than for the American
people to be reminded of Srebrenica? After all, there is still the unfinished
business of dismembering Yugoslavia by amputating Montenegro, Sanjak
and Vojvodina. The New World Order beast will not be satisfied until
its belly is full and that requires the American people to accept NATO's
next intervention in the Balkans; however, the American people must
again be prepared mentally to accept more military action just as they
accepted 78
days of dropping bombs on an innocent people. They have to be conditioned
to say once again, "After all, the Serbs deserve it!"

During
his visit to Washington, D.C. to attend a Congressional briefing in
the office of Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio on 19 July, I had
a chance to speak with former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, James
Bissett, who has been openly critical of his country's participation
in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Last year, he received a phone call
from three Dutch military historians who wanted to meet with him to
talk about Srebrenica. Ambassador Bissett informed them that he had
not been at Srebrenica and could not, therefore, speak as an eyewitness
on the subject. However, because of his broad knowledge of the area
and the circumstances of the Bosnian War, the Dutch historians still
wanted to meet with him. Among other topics, they spoke about Nasir
Oric, the dreaded Muslim commander in Srebrenica who had mounted
commando raids against surrounding Serbian villages whose remaining
population were mainly elderly Serbs, many in their 80s, who refused
to leave their homes. Even these poor souls were not spared, but were
slaughtered by having their throats slit. Bill Schiller wrote of Oric
in the Toronto Star, 16 July 1995, "On a cold and snowy
night, I sat in his living room watching a shocking video version of
what might had been called Nasir Oric's Greatest Hits. There were burning
houses, dead bodies, severed heads, and people fleeing. Oric grinned
throughout admiring his handiwork. 'We ambushed them,' he said when
a number of dead Serbs appeared on the screen. The next sequence of
dead bodies had been done in by explosives: 'We launched those guys
to the moon,' he boasted. When a footage of a bullet-marked ghost town
appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: 'We
killed 114 Serbs there.' Later there were celebrations, with singers
with wobbly voices chanting his praises."

The
three Dutch military historians and Ambassador Bissett recalled that
Serbian General Radko Mladic has protested the misuse of the so-called
"safe haven" of Srebrenica by Oric and warned that continued
attacks on surrounding villages would bring a response from the Serbian
forces. Forewarned, Oric had pulled his armed troops, including Mujahedin
soldiers who had been imported from many of the Islamic countries, out
of Srebrenica three days before the final push began. According to the
Ambassador, when Serbian General Mladic entered Srebrenica, he entered
a city that was mostly devoid of its fighting men. Accused of attacking
a "safe haven" by the media and Muslim propaganda, the Serbs
were even vilified for putting refugees, mostly women and children,
from Srebrenica on buses and sending them to Muslim-held territory.
The tragic scenes of the refugees were shown over and over again on
TV; yet within a few days, the refugees were seen eating fruit, smoking
cigarettes, washing clothes and being housed  thanks to the UN. The
Bosnian government refused to provide humanitarian assistance for its
own people, preferring that the world see a suffering Muslim population
as part of their propaganda ploy.

Tim
Butcher of the Daily Telegraph, London (24 July 1995), wrote
regarding Srebrenica, "After five days of interviews the United
Nations chief investigator into alleged human rights abuses during the
fall of Srebrenica has not found any firsthand witnesses of atrocities."

An
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report, document #37,
dated September 13, 1995 states: "Approximately 5,000 Srebrenica
Muslim troops left the enclave prior to its fall. The Muslim government
has admitted that these men were reassigned to other units of its armed
forces. The fact that family members were not informed of it was justified
by the obligation to keep it a military secret." The ICRC further
reported that there were indications that sporadic clashes broke out
between the Muslim soldiers who wanted to stay and fight and other soldiers
and civilians who wanted to flee. In some cases, the names of "missing"
soldiers are listed as many as two and three times. As previously stated,
approximately fewer than 2,000 bodies have been found in graves. Considering
that the civil war in Bosnia had lasted over four years, this could
not exactly be called a "genocide" when compared to other
massacres taking place all over the world such as in Sierra Leone, Rwanda,
Zimbabwe, and the Indonesia.

A
representative in the Bosnian and Federal Parliaments, Ibran Mustafic,
gave an explosive interview on Aug. 15, 1996, to Slobodna Bosnia
("Free Bosnia," A Sarajevo newspaper). Mustafic was quoted
as saying that the betrayal of Srebrenica "was consciously prepared
and that the Bosnian president and the army command were involved in
this business," and that was to sacrifice Srebrenica in order to
gain the sympathy of the West. Of his internment in a Serbian jail,
he writes, "I should have died. They [the Bosnian Muslim authorities]
don't appreciate living people. They appreciate the dead because they
cannot talk."

Of
course we must not overlook Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde, who was
given a 15-day sentence for entering into Serbian territory with forged
documents. He should thank his lucky stars that he was not captured
by Muslim fighters or he would have been just another dead journalist,
as was ABC's producer David Kaplan, who, according to Yossef Bodansky
(Offensive
in the Balkans) was out of range of Serbian forces when he was
killed. Regardless, Kaplan's death was blamed on the Serbs. And what
earned Mr. Rohde his coveted award? It was based merely on the discovery
of "a pair of glasses, a walking stick and a putrefying leg sticking
out of the ground," according to his book, Endgame:
The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, in an area where men had
fought for over three years. Some genocide!

The
mind set of U.S. officials who were in charge of "peacekeeping"
efforts might best be understood by considering the view of our current
U.N. Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, who spoke of "The 1995 massacre
of thousands of Bosnians Moslems in the U.N.-proclaimed 'safe area'
of Srebrenica." ("Holbrooke mourns Srebrenica, urges reconciliation",
Reuters, July 11). Mr. Holbrooke fails to mention that the so-called
"safe area," which was supposed to be demilitarized, was used
by the Bosnian Muslims as a staging area to attack surrounding Serbian
villages.

The
same diplomat, Mr. Holbrooke, said during an interview with Ted Koppel
on November 6, 1995 (New Yorker), "The Vietcong were dedicated
ideologues, committed to a long-term struggle. These guys [the Serbs]
aren't ideologues; they're just murderous assholes." [Those are
not my offensive words, but the words coming from the bigoted and racist
mouth of our well-seasoned US diplomat who represents us at the UN!).
Mr. Holbrooke praised the communist Vietcong, who killed over 58,000
Americans and denigrated the brave Serbian people who fought, suffered
and sacrificed as our Allies during two world wars.

Yasushi
Akashi, former UN Representative in Bosnia, admitted in the Washington
Times of 1 November 1995, that "it is a fact that the Bosnian
government forces have used the 'safe areas' of not only Srebrenica,
but Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihac, Gorazde for training, recuperation and refurbishing
their troops." In other words, the so-called safe areas were used
as military posts to train Mujahedin fighters from Afghanistan, Iran,
Syria, Turkey and the entire Islamic world, free to commit their treachery
by attacking Serbian villages and returning like thieves in the night
back to the safety of their UN protectors who conveniently looked the
other way to these violations. Prior to the events at Srebrenica, these
"Holy Warriors of Islam" had attacked 42 surrounding Serbian
villages and over 3,000 Serbian villagers had been slaughtered without
fear of being reprimanded or punished by the UN Yet, when Serbs were
provoked to retaliate against these Muslim assaults from these so-called
"safe-areas," they were condemned by the entire world.

Further
proof of the violations of proclaimed "safe areas" by Bosnian
Muslim forces was provided by Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Rose, former UNPROFOR
commander who stated that Muslims "shoot on the Serbs to step up
the pressure and to obtain a fresh intervention from NATO."

Yossef
Bodansky, Staff Director for the Republican Task Force on Terrorism
& Unconventional Warfare, US House of Representatives, writes in
his book, "Offensive in the Balkans" that "The UN concluded
that a special group of Bosnian Muslim forces, many of whom had served
with Islamic terrorist organizations, committed a series of atrocities,
including 'some of the worst recent killings,' against Bosnian Muslim
civilians in Sarajevo [another designated "safe area"] as
a propaganda ploy to win world sympathy and military intervention. These
attacks escalated into premeditated attacks and atrocities committed
against Bosnian Serb civilians trying to flee contested areas."
Furthermore, Michael Evans and Michael Kallenbach write in the Times
(1995), "Thousands of 'missing' Bosnian Muslim soldiers from Srebrenica
who have been at the centre of reports of possible mass executions by
the Serbs, are believed to be safe in the northeast of Tuzla."
The question that no one seemed to ask was what were armed Muslim troops
doing in an area that was supposed to be a demilitarized zone. Instead,
the American media bombarded us with images of then US Ambassador to
the United Nations, Madeleine Albright in August 1995, as she frantically
waved the satellite photo over her head of the plowed field that was
the alleged mass grave of 7,000 Muslim men. Proof positive! she claimed,
of those who had been slaughtered and whose bodies were lying there
only waiting to be exhumed.

While
the world's attention was deliberately focused on Srebrenica by such
theatrical antics by Madeleine Albright, real ethnic cleansing of Serbs
was taking place in the Krajina where, in August of 1995, over 250,000
were being driven from their ancestral homes, thousands slaughtered,
and those too old or infirm to flee, remained only to have their throats
slit. Approximately 650,000 Serbs have been driven out of Croatia since
1992 with little prospect of ever returning. It was US military aid
and technology that made it possible for Croatian forces to conduct
"Operation Storm" in order to achieve their goal of a pure
Croatian state that Hitler could only promise. There was no outrage
from Congress when Croatian jets bombed and strafed Serbian refugee
columns. No outrage to what Charles
Krauthammer described in Newsweek (April 5, 1999) as "the
largest ethnic cleansing of the entire Balkan wars. Investigators with
the war-crimes tribunal in the Hague have concluded that this campaign
was carried out with brutality, wanton murder and indiscriminate shelling
of civilians.... No denunciation. No sanctions. No bombing. No indignant
speeches about ethnic cleansing and the slaughter of innocents. In fact,
in justifying the current bombing of Serbia, Clinton made an indirect
reference to this Croatian campaign when he credited the 'courageous
people in Bosnia and in Croatia' who 'fought back' against the Serbs
and 'helped to end the war.' Indeed, they did. Croatia's savage ethnic
cleansing so demoralized the Serbs that they soon agreed to sign the
Dayton peace accord of 1995." But where were the media when all
this was happening?

"As
the media diverted themselves with satellite photos, the fate of the
Serbs from Krajina is being forgotten. The search for mass graves was
stepped up last autumn. Journalists from all over the world came to
Bosnia to look for bodies. Crews from CNN, CBS, BBC, France II, TG1
(Italy), Dutch Television and from elsewhere arrived in August 1996.
But they found very little. Some crews did not bother at all to find
the soccer field from the satellite photo, because the journalists had
already come to believe that there was no mass grave there anyway. However,
it was not reported. Moreover, the said photo is being used as alleged
evidence of the existence of a mass grave in many articles even today."
("Missing
Evidence," by Linda Ryan, Nova, Frankfurt o/m, March-April,
1996).

So
why, after five years of unsuccessful efforts to turn the casualties
of a tragic civil war, one less bloody than numerous conflicts around
the world, into claims of holocaust and genocide, is the specter of
Srebrenica being raised again? The answer is that this is an attempt
to intimidate and silence the "revisionists" who are questioning
our failed foreign policy in the Balkans, a policy based on lies about
atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo and executed in violations of international
law, the NATO treaty and the US Constitution.

As
a career military officer's wife, Stella Jatras has traveled widely
and has lived in many foreign countries where she not only learned about
other cultures but became very knowledgeable regarding world affairs
and world politics. Stella Jatras lived in Moscow for two years where
her husband, George, was the Senior Air Attaché), and while there,
worked in the Political Section of the US Embassy. Stella has also lived
in Germany, Greece and Saudi Arabia. Her travels took her to over twenty
countries. She is the author of the "Open
Letter to General Michael Short," which antiwar.com carried
on 11/3/99, and "From
Camp Swampy to Camp Bondsteel!" on 4/6/00.